Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark, satirical vision in works including”Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle” was shaped by the horrors he witnessedduring World War II, has died at age 84.

Vonnegut died on Wednesday after suffering brain injuries following a fall weeks ago, said Donald Farber, Vonnegut’s friend, lawyer, agent and manager.

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction, but his 14 novels were classics of the American counterculture, resonating with the U.S. antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam War era.

The author’s Web site, updated after his death, displayed a simple black-and-white image of a bird cage — a symbolic element in his writing — empty with an open door. “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1922-2007,” the page read.

“He was a beautiful man,” Farber said. “I never hung up the phone without having laughed, he always left me laughing, no matter what the circumstances of the world.”

“I last spoke to him the day he fell,” Farber said. “He was in good spirits. Every time he spoke with me no matter what the circumstances in the world, he had a funny angle on it even if it wasn’t a funny thing.”

Despite battles with severe depression, Vonnegut was known for his witticisms.

“I’ve had a hell of a good time,” Vonnegut once wrote. “I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

Irwyn Applebaum, president of the Bantam Dell publishing division of Random House, said, “By all counts he was one of the great writers of the 20th Centuryand continued to be one of the great writers in the 21st Century.”

Bantam Dell publishes some of the author’s seminal works, including”Breakfast of Champions,” “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” which made him a literary idol in the 1960s and 1970s, especially to students.

A defining event in Vonnegut’s life was the firebombing of Dresden, Germany by Allied Forces in 1945, which he witnessed as a young prisoner of war. The bombing killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians. Dresden was the basis for “Slaughterhouse-Five,” published in 1969 against the backdrop of war in Vietnam, racial unrest and cultural and social upheaval.

“There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre,” Vonnegut wrote.

Vonnegut became a cult hero when the novel reached No. 1 on bestseller lists and even more popular among many young Americans when some schools and libraries banned the book for its sexual content, rough language and depictions of violence.

The novel featured a signature Vonnegut phrase, “so it goes,” which became a catch phrase for Vietnam war opponents. After the book was published, Vonnegut went into severe depression and vowed never to write another novel. In 1984, he tried to take his life with sleeping pills and alcohol. His mother had herself committed suicide.

Vonnegut mixed fiction and autobiography in his work, which also blended elements of science fiction and touched on authoritarianism and the dehumanization of man by technology.

Fans said he invented a new literary type but some critics accused him of recycling themes and characters.

“Cat’s Cradle” was published in 1963 and initially sold only about 500 copies but it remains widely read today in high school English classes. Vonnegut’s last book, published in 2005, was a collection of biographical essays, “A Man Without a Country.”

A fourth-generation German-American who was born in Indianapolis, Vonnegut is survived by his second wife photographer Jill Krementz, their daughter and his six other children. Two of his children are published authors.

Mark Vonnegut, named after Mark Twain whom his father admired and bore a striking resemblance to, wrote “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity” about his own descent and eventual recovery from mental illness. He speculated the illness was partly hereditary.

Daughter Edith Vonnegut, an artist, wrote “Domestic Goddesses,” which takes issue with traditional art imagery in which women are shown as weak and helpless.

Vonnegut said the villains in his books were never individuals, but culture, society and history, which he said were making a mess of the planet.

“I like to say that the 51st state is the state of denial,” he told The Associated Press in 2005. “It’s as though a huge comet were heading for us and nobody wants to talk about it. We’re just about to run out of petroleum and there’s nothing to replace it.”

Despite his commercial success, Vonnegut battled depression throughout his life, and in 1984, he attempted suicide with pills and alcohol, joking later about how he botched the job.

“I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations,” Vonnegut, whose watery, heavy-lidded eyes and unruly hair made him seem to be in existential pain, once told a gathering of psychiatrists.

Vonnegut was born on Nov. 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, and studied chemistry at Cornell University before joining the Army. His mother killed herself just before he left for Germany during World War II, where he was quickly taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. He was being held in Dresden when Allied bombs firebombed the city.

“The firebombing of Dresden explains absolutely nothing about why I write what I write and am what I am,” Vonnegut wrote in “Fates Worse Than Death,” his 1991 autobiography of sorts.

But he spent 23 years struggling to write about the ordeal, which he survived by huddling with other POW’s inside an underground meat locker labeled slaughterhouse-five.

The novel that emerged, in which Pvt. Pilgrim is transported from Dresden by time-traveling aliens, was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and solidified his reputation as an iconoclast.

After World War II, he reported for Chicago’s City News Bureau, then did public relations for General Electric, a job he loathed. He wrote his first novel, “Player Piano,” in 1951, followed by “The Sirens of Titan,” “Canary in a Cat House” and “Mother Night,” making ends meet by selling Saabs on Cape Cod.

Critics ignored him at first, then denigrated his deliberately bizarre stories and disjointed plots as haphazardly written science fiction. But his novels became cult classics, especially “Cat’s Cradle” in 1963, in which scientists create “ice-nine,” a crystal that turns water solid and destroys the earth.

He retired from novel writing in his later years, but continued to publish short articles. He had a best-seller in 2005 with “A Man Without a Country,” a collection of his nonfiction, including jabs at the Bush administration (“upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography”) and the uncertain future of the planet. He called the book’s success “a nice glass of champagne at the end of a life.”

Vonnegut, who had homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons in New York, adopted his sister’s three young children after she died. He also had three children of his own with his first wife, Jane Marie Cox, and later adopted a daughter, Lily, with his second wife, Krementz.

Vonnegut once said that of all the ways to die, he’d prefer to go out in an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. He often joked about the difficulties of old age.

“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life; old age is more like a semicolon,” Vonnegut told the AP.

“My father, like Hemingway, was a gun nut and was very unhappy late in life. But he was proud of not committing suicide. And I’ll do the same, so as not to set a bad example for my children.”